“I believed him until the last moment,” Vazquez confessed in Spanish. “The expression he had, the way he spoke — I said to myself, ‘I have also suffered hardships, so why don’t I support him? I know that, in the end, he will repay me.’”

The employer was a New Haven-based contractor who hired Vazquez and two dozen other construction workers to renovate a building in September 2021. Vazquez noted that most of the contractor’s employees, herself included, were undocumented immigrants struggling to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the contractor did not compensate them for working overtime and occasionally paid their salaries late, she described him as a kind employer who always offered his workers a smile and a free coffee. “There was no work [during the pandemic],” Vazquez said in Spanish. “So, the people put up with it.”

Work on the construction project concluded in April 2022, leaving Vasquez without a job. Neither she nor the other workers received a salary for their last month of work. It wasn’t until months later — facing radio silence from her former employer — that Vazquez realized she would never be fully compensated for her work.

She estimates that the contractor withheld about $5,000 of her wages, including the unpaid overtime and salary during the final month of the project.

Spurred on by other stories like Vazquez’s, Eamon Coburn LAW ’25 proposed in June 2023 a city ordinance that would punish wage theft. In Connecticut, wage theft cases fall under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Labor, rather than city police departments. If implemented, Coburn’s proposed ordinance would allow city enforcement of labor laws in wage theft cases.

Coburn said city alders were “pretty receptive” to his idea. Yet almost two years later, no progress has been made on the proposal.

At the forefront of the fight to address wage theft in New Haven is immigrants’ rights organization Unidad Latina en Acción, or ULA, which assists victims of labor exploitation.

“If I go to a Stop and Shop and I steal a salsa or a gallon of milk… they will call the police on me and I can be detained for larceny,” John Jairo Lugo, ULA’s community organizing director, said in Spanish. “But if my boss makes me work the whole week on a roof — with the risk that I fall, that I get sick, that I die at my workplace — and he steals $1,000 of my salary, I can’t go to the police to denounce him because the police of New Haven will tell me that this is a civil offense and I need to go to the Department of Labor.”

The proposed ordinance — drafted by Coburn and other members of Yale Law School’s HAVEN medical-legal partnership — suggests granting the city Department of Health the authority to suspend or even revoke the licenses of businesses that violate labor laws, something Lugo has advocated for since 2013.

The ordinance is the latest in a string of community-based efforts over the past two decades to combat wage theft on the local level. But stalled progress on the proposed reforms has left victims of wage theft to navigate a convoluted Department of Labor system alone.

Case backlog in Connecticut Department of Labor

For Coburn, the recent understaffing of the state Department of Labor, or DOL, makes the proposed New Haven ordinance even more imperative. With a slashed budget and a reduced number of investigators, Connecticut’s DOL faces a growing backlog of cases — and a 63 percent drop in wages recovered in 2024 compared to fiscal year 2014.

Last year’s audit found that as of May 2023, the Connecticut DOL had not begun to investigate 843 of 2,000 workplace complaints since 2021, including a case that took nearly a year to be assigned to a state wage inspector. The audit’s findings sparked outrage among Lugo and other ULA members, who rallied outside the DOL on Aug. 1, 2024.

Lugo condemned the DOL’s delayed response to workplace complaints, which he believes discourages people from reporting future instances of wage theft to the state. 

“A year [after submitting the complaint], it’s possible that I changed my job, I changed my phone number, I’m not living in the same house,” Lugo said in Spanish. “Or the DOL is asking me for documentation that I already lost because a ton of time has passed and I got tired of waiting for them to call me.”

Juliet Manalan, a spokesperson for the DOL, acknowledged the “well-documented” case backlog and limited staff in the DOL unit that oversees workplace complaints. Still, she encouraged victims of wage theft to file a complaint with the department and affirmed that all complaints are reviewed. 

Modeled after similar programs in San Francisco and Santa Clara County, New Haven’s proposed ordinance is grounded in the argument that wage theft is a public health issue — justifying the involvement of the city Department of Health. A 2014 American Journal of Public Health study found that because wage theft contributes to income insecurity, it is linked to hunger, homelessness and other public health issues.

Coburn and Terri Gerstein, founder and director of New York University’s Wagner Labor Initiative, see suspending business licenses as a far bigger disincentive from breaking labor laws than simply requiring employers to pay back the stolen wages. 

“If [employers] have their license suspended for five days, that’s real, that’s reputational harm, that’s income,” Gerstein said. “And also, why should businesses be able to get licenses … if they’re just repeatedly not paying their workers?”

Proposed city ordinance faces legal barriers

After Coburn proposed the ordinance, attorney Patricia King, who represents the city of New Haven, wrote that state law does not permit municipal departments of health to suspend or revoke business licenses in wage theft cases. She added that, unlike San Francisco, New Haven does not have a city labor standards enforcement office that could inform the Department of Health if businesses violated labor laws.

Gerstein, who previously served as Labor Bureau Chief in the New York Attorney General’s Office, argues that attorneys can choose to interpret the law liberally. She noted that California also did not have a law explicitly allowing its city departments of health to revoke licenses because of wage theft.

“As someone who worked in government for a long time, when people say that something can’t be done… another lawyer reviewing the same information might have come to a different conclusion,” Gerstein said. 

Still, California attorneys highlighted a statute requiring all licensees to follow state and federal laws, allowing San Francisco and Santa Clara County to implement license revocation programs.

King questioned the legality of the proposed city ordinance. In her opinion, there are two possible legal alternatives to the proposed ordinance. 

First, she recommended assigning a New Haven police officer as a liaison between the DOL and local community members with pending workplace complaints. She later wrote to the News that the officer would not have the authority to aid the DOL’s investigations, so this would not reduce the DOL’s case backlog. And New Haven Police Department Officer Christian Bruckhart questioned the feasibility of this recommendation, noting that the NHPD has faced an officer shortage for several years. 

Another alternative, King said, would be a city ordinance requiring businesses applying for new or renewed licenses to comply with state and federal employment laws. Similar ordinances have been adopted in Jersey City, NJ, Somerville, MA and Northampton, MA.

Since HAVEN, the Yale clinic where Coburn volunteers, is focused on a public health approach to wage theft, its members have zeroed in on King’s licensing suggestion, he said. Coburn described it as a “very promising option” that captured the spirit of the original proposal, and said he is optimistic that the ordinance will eventually be implemented.

Yet in the past year, the Yale clinic has not completed a new proposed ordinance based on the city’s feedback, nor have they met with city alders about a tweaked proposal. 

Both James Bhandary-Alexander, director of the HAVEN medical-legal partnership, and city alder Sarah Miller, who was involved in early conversations about the ordinance, declined the News’ requests for an interview. Miller explained that “no further progress” has been made so far on the proposal, and Bhandary-Alexander wrote that “it is being held up a bit by the current total chaos,” alluding to the second Trump administration’s impact on New Haven.

John DeStefano — who served as mayor of New Haven from 1994 to 2014, when immigrant community organizers first began raising the question of how the city could enforce state wage claim laws — put it more bluntly. “The fact that nothing happened is, in fact, a decision,” he said.

20 years of city inaction: advocates struggle to secure protection from wage theft 

Since its formation in 2002, ULA has advocated on behalf of immigrants who have experienced wage theft. Undocumented immigrants are especially vulnerable to labor exploitation, as they are overrepresented as workers in industries plagued by wage theft, like agriculture, food services and hotel work. Immigrants also tend to be reluctant to report wage theft because of language barriers and fears of interacting with federal immigration authorities.

ULA has also unsuccessfully spearheaded multiple efforts for the local enforcement of state wage laws.

The first of those efforts began in 2004, amid calls for city immigration reform from ULA, St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church and immigrant advocacy group Junta for Progressive Action. In conversations with DeStefano and other city officials, the organizations identified seven policy recommendations, including the enforcement of criminal wage laws by the NHPD.

DeStefano oversaw the implementation of three of the groups’ recommendations, although no progress was made on the proposed police enforcement of wage laws.

In 2014, ULA organizers submitted a letter outlining recommended wage theft programs to Toni Harp, then-mayor of New Haven. The organization proposed license revocations, quicker criminal prosecution of employers that committed wage theft and a database rendering employers that violated labor laws ineligible for city contracts and tax incentives. None of ULA’s three proposals got off the ground, according to Lugo.

In conversations with the News, DeStefano and Harp struggled to recall the details of the wage theft programs proposed during their respective terms. While none of ULA’s ideas faced strong opposition when they were introduced, the former mayors were skeptical about the feasibility of the proposed programs. DeStefano doubted the city’s ability to staff the programs, and Harp was unsure if undocumented immigrants trusted the police enough to report labor law violations.

Lugo highlighted a minor success in 2010, when the NHPD agreed to assist ULA’s efforts to recover stolen wages from employers. After ULA organizers attempted to contact an employer accused of wage theft, calling for the employer to repay the wronged employee upfront, rather than undergoing a lengthy DOL case, an NHPD officer would support those efforts by sending the employer a message urging them to meet with ULA. 

But since these efforts were a “formality” without any real enforcement power, Lugo said, they were not successful in convincing employers to negotiate with ULA and soon ceased. NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson, who joined the NHPD in 2007, was unaware of the initiative described by Lugo. He thinks these were likely efforts by an individual officer, rather than a department-wide policy.

Lugo, city officials grapple with lack of local progress on wage theft

Several former and current city officials flagged the unknown scope of the issue as a factor in the city’s lack of action in tackling wage theft. 

Between 2018 and April 2023, the Connecticut DOL received over 13,000 worker complaints, averaging over 2,700 cases each year. Specifically in New Haven, Lugo said ULA assists victims in 20 to 30 wage theft cases annually, though he called this the “tip of the iceberg.”

“With wage theft, there are so many workers whose rights are being violated who do not come forward, either because they don’t know their rights or because of fear of retaliation, fear of losing their job,” Gerstein, the NYU labor law expert, told the News.

Bruckhart, the NHPD’s public information officer, echoed former Mayor Harp’s point about undocumented immigrants being reluctant to contact the police if they experience wage theft and other labor exploitation, despite New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city — a municipality that discourages local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Current Mayor Justin Elicker estimates that only one or two wage theft cases make their way to the NHPD each year, contributing to the uncertainty around the issue’s prevalence.

Lugo expressed frustration about the lack of local change to address wage theft, despite over two decades of advocacy. Past ULA efforts around wage theft have been met by city resistance, he noted. Lugo has been arrested multiple times in connection with ULA’s protests of businesses that allegedly committed wage theft.

He was especially incensed by a January 2023 Board of Alders public hearing about proposed revisions to the city charter, during which an alder cut off a ULA member testifying about facing wage theft and sexual harassment from her employer. This prompted Lugo, the woman providing testimony and two dozen other ULA members to walk out of the meeting.

Lugo believes the alders’ refusal to hear immigrant testimony reflects the larger disinterest among city officials and a lack of political will to address wage theft.

Elicker disagreed with Lugo’s view that the city has not done enough to address wage theft. He emphasized the legal challenges that King, the city’s attorney, raised in connection with HAVEN’s initial proposal.

“We would, of course, want to do more to help address wage theft if we have those tools,” he said. “But I wouldn’t frame this as, ‘if only the city cared about this issue, we could do something more.’ Our assessment is we can’t do anything more under state statute.”

Challenges to address wage theft at the state level

King, Elicker and other city officials also pointed to insufficient funding for the state DOL. The DOL currently employs 12 wage enforcement agents, according to Manalan, compared to 18 in November 2022. The department’s budget and staff cuts have coincided with its growing case backlog.

“The proper place to direct advocacy energy is towards more resources for the Department of Labor at the state, because that’s the main mechanism, the primary mechanism, to enforce wage theft violations, and it’s very clear they don’t have enough resources,” Elicker said. 

Yet state legislators have failed to pass bills that would have increased the state’s number of wage and hour inspectors, who ensure that employers are complying with labor laws, in the two most recent legislative sessions. A similar bill, introduced in the current legislative session, was added to the calendar for the state House of Representatives on March 27 but has not advanced since then.

Local 269 President Xavier Gordon, who heads the union that represents the DOL’s wage and hour inspectors, attributed the previous two bills’ failure to the “powerful corporate lobby” that discourages lawmakers from increasing state spending.

Brian Anderson — legislative and political director for Council 4, which encapsulates Local 269 and other unions for Connecticut’s public employees — echoed Gordon’s argument, pointing to two major lobbyist groups: the Connecticut Business Industry Association and the Connecticut Yankee Institute.

“Their mission is to cut the state budget so that corporate executives pay as little in taxes as possible,” Anderson wrote to the News, referring to the fact that tax revenue partially funds the state budget. “By attempting to suppress the budget and eliminate revenue that could hire more DOL wage and hour inspectors, they aim to ensure that laws designed to protect workers are unenforceable so that the balance of power remains on the side of corporations and the rich.”

Both groups have lobbied against loosening the state’s fiscal guardrails — a strict state spending cap instated in 2017 — in the past. Yet spokespeople for the groups emphasized that they did not directly oppose either of the bills that would have increased DOL funding. Indeed, the public hearing testimony for both bills is solely composed of supportive statements from activists and victims of wage theft.

Like Elicker, DeStefano thinks the unclear scope of wage theft on a statewide level was likely the main factor behind the bills’ failure.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of issues that meaningfully affect people and their lives and their families that don’t come to resolution in legislative sessions,” he said. “Sometimes things don’t move because they’re not big matters to other folks.”

City officials, activists double down on immigrant protections 

The challenges to address wage theft on the state level again raise the question of how New Haven officials can fight the issue on the local level. 

Although the HAVEN clinic’s proposed ordinance is still at a standstill, labor law expert Gerstein outlined a host of alternative ways municipalities can fight wage theft. Other cities have established worker protection units to streamline the criminal prosecutions of employers that violate labor laws, have carried out stop-work orders against offending businesses and have formed municipal labor standards offices to directly enforce labor laws.

Coburn and Ward 15 Alder Frank Redente, who represents part of Fair Haven, the city’s immigrant enclave, pointed to the actions of the second Trump administration as a potential influence on the fate of the ordinance. With President Donald Trump promising to nix federal funding for sanctuary cities like New Haven, Redente said he and other city officials are especially focused on protecting the city’s immigrant community.

“Issues around the dignity of workers — workers generally, and also around the workers who are most affected by the misconduct that we’re targeting, who are immigrant workers — will be really central the next four years,” Coburn said.

Lugo remains skeptical about the city’s willingness to address wage theft. Right now, his priority is getting city officials to understand the wide-reaching impact of the issue.

Though former and current city officials expressed uncertainty about the issue’s scope in the city, several of them cited New Haven’s most notorious examples of wage theft: Gourmet Heaven, a 24-hour deli often frequented by Yale students, shut down in 2015 after its owner was charged with withholding over $250,000 in wages. Another infamous example is that of Italian pastry shop Rocco’s Bakery, whose owner was found to have underpaid and physically and sexually abused his undocumented immigrant employees between 2007 and 2008.

Lugo hopes to keep holding protests outside of offending storefronts to boost awareness of the city’s wage theft problem. He continues to turn over one question in his head: “How can we create these scandals so they can no longer be blind to the reality that we are experiencing downtown?”

As for Vazquez, the construction worker who has yet to receive $5,000 in owed compensation, she and a dozen former coworkers submitted their pay stubs and other documentation of the wage theft experienced to the state DOL in mid-2022. Three years later, they’re still waiting for justice to be served — and so Bella Vazquez continues to tell her story.

“What are they waiting for?” Vazquez asked in Spanish, referring to the DOL’s wage enforcement agents. “Others don’t dare to denounce [their employers] because they see that we still haven’t accomplished anything. So, what are [the DOL] doing? They’re wasting time.”
In Governor Ned Lamont’s biennial budget proposal, he allocated $83.3 million to the DOL’s budget for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year, a nearly 7 percent increase from the previous fiscal year.

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On April 14, 1997, 21-year-old Malik Jones was shot and killed by an East Haven police officer at close range after the officer pursued Malik’s car, and Jones did not pull over. In the years following Malik’s death, Emma Jones sued the town of East Haven and embarked on years of advocacy work and demonstrations against police misconduct. Among the fruits of her efforts was the 2020 revamping of New Haven’s Civilian Review Board.

At the Monday evening gathering, located at the corner where Malik was killed, Jones unveiled plans to purchase a small plot of land at that intersection to house the Malik Jones Social Justice Organization.

“This is going to be the future home of nothing but pure joy for the community,” Jones said. “It’s going to be the opportunity for people to come and to learn some things about what happened here on that particularly awful day … We are not here to talk about all of the specifics around what we’re going to do, but we are definitely kicking off, starting today, a fundraiser to purchase this property.”

A banner hung on the fence separating the sidewalk from the vacant lot behind Jones as she addressed the dozens gathered. The banner featured a projected image of the organization’s prospective building and advertised the organization’s website, calling on passersby to support the cause.

According to Jones’ website, the organization, also called the M.A.L.I.K Organization, aims to create a community space to honor stories of fighting for justice in the face of adversity, as well as offer “essential resources and support to those in need.” At the gathering, Jones acknowledged that she has not yet figured out the organization’s title acronym.

“Never before in the history of police brutality in America has a mother had the opportunity to purchase the property where her son was killed by law enforcement and transform it into a space that supports, acknowledges, and empowers families and community members who have endured similar tragedies,” the site reads.

A handful of Jones’s friends and family also spoke at Monday’s event, sharing anecdotes and poems about Malik. Reggie Hoffler, a longtime friend of Jones who said he had attended the annual memorial for the past two decades, emphasized the diversity and youth of the crowd.

Cars and motorcycles whizzed by, frequently honking their horns and revving their engines in support of Malik.

In October, the Board of Alders voted to rename the corner of Grand Avenue and Murphy Drive, where Malik Jones was killed, the “Emma Jones Justice for Malik Corner.”

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The New Haven Police Department received three 9-1-1 calls alerting them to gunshots and injured people in the road at 9:50 p.m., Police Chief Karl Jacobson said at a Tuesday press conference. When officers responded to the scene two minutes after the calls, they found two men “laying in the street unresponsive with gunshot wounds,” according to a NHPD press release. New Havener Clifford Capehart, 49, died at the scene, while Hamden resident Keron Troutman, 39, was transported to Yale New Haven Hospital and succumbed to his injuries later that night.

Capehart and Troutman were friends, Jacobson added at the press conference. Police believe the men were involved in a robbery or a “drug deal gone bad,” as officers found some “drug evidence” on the scene. Neither of the men were carrying weapons, so officers believe there is at least one shooter still at large.

“I talked to Capehart’s mother last night, who was obviously visibly shaken,” Jacobson said. “Our condolences go out to both families, and we’re going to do everything possible to find out who did this.”

Jacobson emphasized that the investigation is ongoing, although the NHPD has been “getting good response from the community so far.” 

After police finished reviewing the area of the shooting, the New Haven Fire Department was dispatched around 3:41 a.m. to clean up the scene. Firefighters returned to the scene around 9:30 a.m. to finish cleaning up, according to NHPD spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart.

“Unfortunately, it’s dark,” Bruckhart said. “They missed something. It’s tough.”

According to the NHPD’s most recently published crime data, as of March 23, New Haven had had two murders in 2025.

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Mousou, who immigrated to the United States from Syria in 2012, began working at IRIS as an Arabic and Kurdish interpreter in February 2023, and later became a case manager on the agency’s resettlement and placement team. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 24 stop-work order to refugee resettlement programs nationwide, Mousou spent those daily car rides worrying about losing his job at IRIS.

“I drop my kids every morning at school … and one day I told them, ‘guys, I might get laid off,’” Mousou recalled. “After two days, [my son] told me, ‘Dad, I was praying today before I slept that you don’t get laid off, because I know how much you love your clients.’”

At the start of February, Mousou learned that eight members of his 10-person team had been laid off because of funding cuts. Within two weeks, Mousou and his remaining colleague were let go, too.

IRIS boasted 94 staff members prior to Trump’s inauguration. The agency had been set to receive $4 million in federal funding in 2025, all of which was rescinded because of Trump’s stop-work order. 

Over the past two and a half months, these funding cuts have forced IRIS’s Executive Director Maggie Mitchell Salem to winnow the staff down to 34 members. Salem said these layoffs have impacted each of IRIS’s departments, including the senior management team, which shrunk from four to two members.

The agency was also forced to close its Hartford office at the beginning of the month and plans to shut down its New Haven office, from which IRIS has operated since 2006, on April 30. 

“We’re doing this because we want to reduce our overhead in order to continue serving [refugees],” Salem said, describing the impetus behind shutting down the offices. “It’s about making really hard choices, and all nonprofits are having to do this right now.”

IRIS staff will be able to meet with clients from its food pantry at 75 Hamilton St., which distributes food and other household items each Wednesday, according to Salem. The agency is also continuing to offer education programming at United Church on the Green, located at 270 Temple St., and staff will begin to meet with clients and use some office storage space at the church. Otherwise, IRIS staff will work remotely.

Kathy Sheppard, who managed IRIS’s Ukrainian program from August 2022 to November 2023, felt compelled to help IRIS after learning about the federal funding cuts. Over the past few months, Sheppard — along with former IRIS employees Barbara Davis, Cindy Dunn and Kristy Jefferson, who were laid off the day of the stop-work order  — has mobilized IRIS’s volunteer program in hopes of keeping the agency afloat.

Since Feb. 27, IRIS has gained 214 volunteers across nine teams, which assist refugees with financial literacy, finding employment and other needs, according to Sheppard. 154 of the volunteers are members of the flex team, which means that they are willing to do additional volunteer work outside of their designated teams. 

Each time an IRIS staff member has a task they need a volunteer to take on, they add it to a spreadsheet. Then, Sheppard, Davis, Dunn and Jefferson — who have dubbed themselves “admins” of the volunteer program — assign the task to a volunteer from the relevant team or the flex team and keep track of when tasks are completed.

“Our case managers would have to have 72 hours in the day in order to respond to everyone’s phone calls and the questions, so we’re hoping our volunteers can fill in and answer some of those more simple questions,” Sheppard said.

Each of the volunteer teams is headed by a team leader, whether a member of a co-sponsorship group who has experience working with refugee families or a former IRIS employee. Mousou has led the crisis response team since mid-March. 

Setting up the volunteer program required a significant time commitment from the four admins, who are also volunteers, according to Dunn, who described it as “almost [a] full time job” for the first few weeks. Dunn estimates that she now spends around three hours a day keeping the volunteer program running.

Dunn and Sheppard expressed confidence that their volunteer model is a sustainable one, noting that the Trump administration halted the admission of refugees on Jan. 20, which will eventually ease up the backlog of tasks for IRIS staff.

As of now, the four admins are laser-focused on keeping the volunteer program running smoothly. Davis and Dunn initially looked for work after getting laid off by IRIS but are concentrated on the volunteer program, and in Davis’s case, continuing to lead a co-sponsorship group in Danbury. Similarly, Mousou is focused on helping his former clients. 

“Volunteering got me out of that funk of, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with myself, and I don’t know what to do to help people,” Dunn said. “Not only does it help IRIS, but I think it helps the three of us.”

Both Davis and Mousou noted that their spouses are still employed full-time, which helped them justify devoting themselves to volunteer work from a financial standpoint. 

The three former staff members hope to return to work in refugee resettlement, and specifically to IRIS, in the near future.

“It’s horrific to leave some of the most vulnerable people in the world stranded without services,” Davis said, reflecting on the federal funding cuts. “It’s unimaginable that any administration would think that that was something that was a good way to draw down a program — to leave people so exposed to such risk.”

IRIS assisted 2,055 clients, who spanned 25 home countries, in 2024.

Correction, April 4: A previous version of the article misattributed statements made by Mousou.

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The lawsuit followed the Department of Homeland Security’s Jan. 20 rescission of a Biden-era guideline protecting schools, hospitals and congregations from intrusion by federal immigration authorities. In February, 27 national and regional denominations signed on as plaintiffs, including the parent denominations for New Haven’s First Presbyterian Church, First and Summerfield United Methodist Church, and Congregation Mishkan Israel.

Another lawsuit filed two weeks later, involving regional Quaker, Baptist and Sikh congregations, prompted a Maryland judge to temporarily block federal immigration authorities from entering these congregations. However, that lawsuit’s ruling does not provide legal protections for other congregations, not involved in the lawsuit.

Glen Formica, a New Haven attorney who has worked on legal cases involving sanctuary in churches, said that the lawsuit involving New Haven congregations challenges the “fear narrative” that the current presidential administration is “aggressively” advancing. 

“They want to create this narrative of fear that says, ‘nowhere are you safe,’” Formica said. “‘We’ll pull you out of a church pew, we’ll wheel you out of a hospital bed, and we’ll come into your schools and grab your children.’”

Although there is a precedent for federal immigration authorities not entering houses of worship — based on the 2011 Department of Homeland Security memorandum of understanding, which prohibits authorities from entering “sensitive locations” like churches — there is no legal basis, according to Formica. 

Formica believes that no other president has tried to revoke the guideline because it would invite “bad political optics.”

“What does it say for us as a society that this administration is so willing to engage in activities that most, if not all, Americans would find deeply morally repugnant?” said Kica Matos, who heads the National Immigration Law Center and is a former executive director of New Haven’s Junta for Progressive Action. “Not even places of worship are sacred.”

Rabbi Herb Brockman, the rabbi emeritus of Hamden’s Congregation Mishkan Israel, which is associated with the Union of Reform Judaism, is also joining the lawsuit. He described the deportations during the current Trump administration as “chaotic,” even compared to his previous administration. 

Brockman mentioned that during the previous Trump administration, people were sometimes given up to 30 days before they would be deported. Now, the timeline has changed. 

Formica echoed this sentiment, describing the differences between the current Trump administration and the previous one as “night and day.”

“The first Trump administration was pretty restrained compared to where they’re at now,” Formica said. “This is next level. They’re trying to run a psychological operation to frighten, terrorize and motivate all foreign nationals to leave.”

All three congregations involved in the lawsuit were members of a loose coalition of 13 houses of worship willing to provide sanctuary and legal aid for undocumented immigrants during the first Trump administration. Brockman, Matos, Pastor Héctor Otero and Reverend Paul Fleck spearheaded the movement shortly after Trump’s 2016 election.

As a collective, the coalition provided refuge for nine people throughout the first Trump administration, eight of whom left sanctuary after receiving legal relief, according to Fleck.

Fleck and Matos stressed that the revocation of immigration protections for houses of worship has upped the stakes for congregations that have been willing to provide sanctuary in the past.

“Congregations that used to offer sanctuary have had to weigh whether they’re willing to openly defy the government,” Matos said.

She explained that some national houses of worship have shifted away from providing sanctuary to other forms of support for immigrants, such as organizing food pantries and accompanying congregation members to court hearings.

Fleck believes that federal immigration authorities will primarily detain undocumented people on the streets and disregard those seeking sanctuary in houses of worship. He worries that this will force undocumented people to remain in sanctuary for an extended period, creating a “tremendous drain” for congregation resources.

The Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush.

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According to a New Haven Police Department press release, the suspect “aggressively approached” an individual outside the synagogue and said, “What if I throw this hot coffee in your face, you dirty Ashkenazi Jew. I used to beat your kind in New York.” The suspect then lunged at the individual, prompting him to run inside the synagogue.

After searching the area, NHPD officers arrested Nicholus Smith, who now faces charges for third-degree intimidation based on bigotry or bias, which is a felony, and second-degree breach of peace. 

“We believe it is an isolated incident,” Westville Synagogue Rabbi Fred Hyman wrote to the News. “We did have a guard posted during shabbos services” — weekly prayer services on Friday night and Saturday to honor the Sabbath.

New Haven Police Department communications officer Christian Bruckhart also described the incident as “upsetting,” but not indicative of a larger threat to the community.

Hyman noted that the synagogue’s leadership have been in close contact with NHPD officers, Mayor Justin Elicker and Michael Shanbrom, the regional security advisor for the Secure Community Network. Shanbrom oversees security for the Jewish Federations of Greater New Haven, Western Connecticut and Greater Stamford, as well as the Jewish Community Center in Greenwich.

As of Sunday evening, Smith is being held on a $10,000 bond. According to Bruckhart, Smith will not appear in court to be arraigned until Monday, because he was processed after the time when the department would usually escort an arrested individual to court for an appearance. The court is closed on Saturday and Sunday.

Westville Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox synagogue, is located at 74 W. Prospect St.

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On the day he died, Jones — who was diagnosed with schizophrenia — was slated for a transfer to Garner Correctional Institution’s psychiatric ward for treatment. The state Department of Correction strip search policy states that these searches should be carried out each time an incarcerated person is placed in a specialized housing unit, including medical and mental health areas.

After Jones refused the strip search, multiple correctional officers pepper-sprayed him in the face, punched him and forced him onto a bed over a nearly half-hour period. The correctional officers and a nearby nurse did not administer CPR or call 9-1-1 for seven minutes after Jones fell unconscious. 

The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner classified Jones’ death as a homicide.

“J’Allen Jones would be alive today if he had just submitted to getting on his knees and pressing his chest against a bed so that the correctional officers can look up his rectum,” said Barbara Fair, who heads criminal justice reform organization Stop Solitary CT and organized Tuesday’s press conference. “What we’re doing is wrong. It’s sadistic, it’s disgusting and its purpose is to break people and dehumanize them.”

Fair has long supported the implementation of body scanning machines — x-ray machines that detect contraband on the body — in prisons. Body scanners would reduce the need for strip searches; a 2024 DOC report estimated that body scanners would have eliminated the need for 235,050 strip searches in 2023.

However, Fair flagged the high cost of body scanners, arguing that revising the DOC’s strip search policy so that searches happen less frequently is a quicker and cheaper solution. 

Past attempts to revise strip search policy have been unsuccessful. In 2023, the state legislature introduced a bill that would raise the bar for performing strip searches from “reasonable suspicion” to “probable cause” that an individual is carrying contraband, but it was watered down into a law that required a DOC report on the cost of implementing body scanners.

Both state Rep. Anne Hughes and state Sen. Gary Winfield, who represents New Haven, attended Tuesday’s press conference and emphasized the psychological toll of strip searches. Hughes has introduced two bills aimed at regulating strip searches in the current legislative session.

“I’m urging all of my colleagues to vote for policy change once and for all,” Hughes said. “Mr. Jones should be our George Floyd moment in changing everything.” 

At the press conference, two former DOC employees and a formerly incarcerated man shared stories about witnessing or experiencing strip searches.

Hassan Foster, a New Havener who knew Jones when they were incarcerated together at Garner in 2015 and 2016, described two strip searches he underwent in prison. In one of the instances, Foster said, a female correctional officer carried out a strip search on him and ignored his requests to be searched by a male staff member instead. 

The DOC strip search policy states that correctional staff make “[r]easonable accommodations” to ensure same-gender strip searches, but if a same-gender correctional officer is not available and the strip search is considered “essential without delay,” then a cross-gender strip search will be conducted.

“This is the type of thing that goes on in there,” Foster said. “They don’t care about your rights. They don’t care about anything.”

Kevnesha Boyd, another speaker at the press conference, worked as a mental health counselor at New Haven Correctional Center for four years. 

Each day, she had to collect incarcerated people from the admissions and processing room — where they were often being strip searched — to bring them to her office for a meeting about their mental health. 

“When I hear the story of Mr. Jones,” Boyd said, “I can only hear the collective echoed voices of the many incarcerated people that I heard say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ‘Is there a different way that we can do this?’ ‘I don’t have anything.’ ‘I’ve been patted down.’”

Fair, Hughes and other speakers also noted that the video of Jones’s death at the hands of correctional officers has not been released to the public, despite almost seven years of litigation between the officers and Jones’s estate. 

In October 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut filed a petition with the appellate court for the immediate release of the video of Jones’s death. The appellate court then ordered the Superior Court to hold a hearing to determine whether the video should be sealed or shared with the public. 

At the hearing, which was held in late December 2024, the decision whether to release the video was postponed again. Dan Barrett, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, clarified on Tuesday that the Superior Court still has not made a decision about whether to release the video.

“We would like the public to be the judges [of] what actually happened,” Barrett said. “Not stories, not a government employee’s say-so, but facts — and this video is the prime, and perhaps even the sole, evidence of what happened to Mr. Jones.”

The next hearing in the Jones estate’s lawsuit is scheduled for Aug. 26.

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City detectives, assisted by DNA testing company Othram, found that Reyes, now 27, is living in Puebla, Mexico. Reyes and her father have been in contact for the first time since her kidnapping, according to an NHPD press release.

“This case reflects the hard work of our officers and detectives,” NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson said in the press release. “While cases may have investigative leads exhausted at the time, no cold case is ever truly closed. We remain committed to resolving every cold case and this is a perfect example of that effort.”

The NHPD began investigating Reyes’ case in October 1999 after reports that she had been taken from New Haven by her mother, Rosa Tenorio. Reyes’ father — whose name has not been revealed and who “requests that his anonymity be respected,” according to the press release — had full custody of his daughter.

City police worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, issuing a felony arrest warrant for Tenorio, who was suspected to have taken her daughter to Mexico. Reyes’ father headed to Mexico several times to search for his daughter in person but did not get in contact with Reyes or Tenorio.

In 2023, NHPD Detective Kealyn Nivakoff — a member of the Special Victims Unit specializing in missing persons cases — was reviewing cold cases and decided to reinvestigate Reyes’ disappearance. NHPD communications officer Christian Bruckhart told the News that Nivakoff proactively began reinvestigating ones with leads she felt she could follow up on.

Nivakoff used interviews, search warrants and social media to determine Reyes’ current whereabouts in Puebla, per the press release. She also collaborated with Othram to confirm the relationship between Reyes and her father, who both provided Othram with DNA samples upon request. Bruckhart and FBI New Haven spokesperson Anthony Constanza confirmed that the FBI helped the NHPD in the reinvestigation.

Tenorio’s federal arrest warrant is still active, although it is only valid within the United States and NHPD officers suspect she is still living in Mexico. Bruckhart explained that if she is identified in the United States, NHPD officers can extradite her to Connecticut.

“There’s like a Dante’s ‘Inferno’ of levels of how far we’re willing to go to get somebody,” Bruckhart said, explaining the department’s extradition process. “Something where, like, you’ve abducted a child, we’ll go anywhere in the country to go pick them up.”

Reyes’ identification marks the seventh case in Connecticut where officials used Othram technology to identify an individual.

The post New Haven detective solves nearly three decade-old child abduction case appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The tentative agreement was made during a Judiciary Committee hearing last month.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to talk. But I brought a picture of my son, so that people could just see [it] and humanize him,” Colleen Lord, Robby Talbot’s mother, told the News.

The case’s original complaint was filed by Lord and Robert Francis Talbot Jr. — Talbot’s parents and the co-administrators of his estate — on Feb. 28, 2022. It alleges that Talbot, who was both physically and mentally ill, was subjected to “excessive,” “unreasonable” and “significant force,” and denied “necessary, appropriate and required medical care” by correctional officers, leading to his death. 

The complaint also alleges that internal reports detailing the circumstances that led to Talbot’s death were falsified. Documents submitted in 2019 affirmed that legally-mandated routine checks of an inmate under restraint took place for Talbot. Yet, an initial internal investigation executed by the Department of Corrections in February 2021 discovered that these checklists were forged after the fact.

According to Commissioner of Corrections Angel Quiros, the individuals involved in the fabrication are still unknown.

“You have my full commitment for my remaining term as Commissioner that I [will] try to do everything possible to ensure this does not happen again,” Quiros said during the hearing. A new internal investigation will be launched into the falsification of the reports this year. 

“The details in the Lord v. Padro case are deeply disturbing,” wrote Sen. John Kissel, who was present at the Judiciary Committee hearing, in a press release. “A man lost his life while in state custody, and to this day, there are still unanswered questions about what happened, why it happened and how we can be certain that it will not happen again.”

Talbot died 36 hours after his return to prison

Robby Talbot had been remanded to New Haven’s Correctional Center the evening of March 19, 2019 for a parole violation. The morning of his death, he was being temporarily housed in the prison’s medical center, allegedly awaiting an assessment by a physician for mental health and detoxification concerns.

Talbot, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as an adolescent, struggled with substance abuse issues and schizoaffective symptoms caused by his condition. He also suffered from obstructive sleep apnea and asthma, and consequently relied upon inhalers, Ventolin and a BiPAP, or CPAP, machine to aid with his breathing difficulties.

According to Lord and Talbot Jr.’s complaint, Talbot had also been prescribed methadone to treat his addiction issues. However, this medication was allegedly not provided to Talbot at the center.

“He did not get any treatment. He did not get his methadone, he did not get any of his psychiatric medication,” said Lord. “They did not give him his BiPAP machine, and they put him in a solitary cell. One of the guards saw that he needed to be seen by a psychiatric doctor because he was going into withdrawal, which triggered his mania and [started a] psychotic break.”

Around 6:30 a.m., Talbot began to experience a severe mental health episode. Officers entered Talbot’s unit to intervene and remove him to shower, a directive with which Talbot complied. 

But when he refused to exit the shower, Lieutenant Carlos Padro doused Talbot twice with pepper spray and kicked him. By 7:23 a.m., footage of the incident showed Talbot had been pepper-sprayed two more times and restrained by a “pig pile” — when multiple correctional officers place their full or partial body weight on an inmate to install their “in-cell restraints.” 

By 8:45 a.m., the new sergeant on duty noticed Talbot was quiet and still in his cell. A Code White was activated and resuscitation efforts undertaken. Talbot was transported to Yale New Haven Hospital, where he was pronounced dead by 9:40 a.m., approximately 36 hours after he had returned to the New Haven Correctional Center.

Ending the “culture of violence”

Barbara Fair, who heads the New Haven criminal justice organization Stop Solitary CT, first met Lord in 2019 after organizing a vigil in Talbot’s memory outside of the New Haven Correctional Center. Since then, Lord has participated in rallies, press conferences and other prison reform advocacy events organized by Stop Solitary.

Lord has specifically striven to reverse the stigma regarding mental illness, and to provide crisis intervention training to correctional officers. The recent settlement stipulates that Lord provide a video and deliver in-person training that incorporates the footage of Talbot’s death, to showcase the tangible human cost of excessive force. 

“I want to remind officers that they have a duty to intervene, and they need to maintain their humanity in their jobs,” Lord said. “I can’t imagine the kind of pressure they [have to go through], but that’s where the training comes in, so they can recognize people going through mental health issues, like my son.”

Fair pointed to the emotional toll the lengthy legal process took on Lord. She also voiced frustration that Padro was the only correctional officer prosecuted for his involvement in Talbot’s death, despite other officers not intervening when Padro kicked and pepper-sprayed him.

“What kind of a message does that send to people that are incarcerated?” Fair said. “And also for the correctional officers — [they] think that they can continue this culture of violence against incarcerated people and not have to suffer consequences.”

Fair compared Talbot’s case to the 2018 death of J’Allen Jones, who was incarcerated at Garner Correctional Institution. After Jones refused to comply with a strip search, multiple correctional officers pepper-sprayed him in the face, punched him and forced onto a bed over a nearly half-hour period. The correctional officers and a nearby nurse did not administer CPR or call 9-1-1 for seven minutes after Jones fell unconscious.

Shortly after Jones’ death, his family filed a lawsuit against correctional officers and a nurse who were in Jones’ vicinity when he became unresponsive. The lawsuit — which has faced delays over the past six-and-a-half years, including recent legal battles over whether the video of Jones’s death can be released to the public — is scheduled to go to trial on May 6.

Jones’ death preceded Talbot’s by a year, and both men’s deaths were filmed, Fair noted. She compared the two legal battles, emphasizing that Talbot and Lord are white while Jones and his family are Black.

“I feel people can hear the tears of a white woman. They don’t hear those tears when a Black woman cries,” Fair said. “It was an uphill battle for [Lord] to get any kind of justice, and it just makes me concerned about, will J’Allen’s mom get any justice in the end?”

Talbot leaves a legacy

Lord hopes to use the settlement sum to establish a family foundation, which would distribute local and national grants related to mental health treatment.

For Lord, a key concern is Connecticut’s dearth of mental health beds and treatment avenues. She contends that Talbot, who allegedly visited emergency rooms seeking support thirty-nine times and was refused admission and treatment, is indicative of this endemic issue.

“Robby never hurt anybody in his life. [And] he fell through everything. He fell through all the safety nets,” Lord said. “He started to self-medicate because he would tell me it made him feel normal. It was very dangerous and I didn’t approve of it, but I always took care of him.”

She hopes for several of these mental health treatment grants to go to New Haven.

“Robby loved New Haven. He couldn’t really work — he was on psychiatric disability — but he would sometimes sell flowers on the street,” Lord said. “He would cut roses until late at night before Valentine’s Day.”

The Judiciary Committee met on Valentine’s Day nearly six years after his death.

The post Connecticut agrees to $3.75 million settlement for homicide of man in New Haven prison appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The 2021 law bars the state from receiving revenue from prison communications. In order for Lamont’s proposal to eliminate free electronic messages to go into effect, the law would have to be amended such that incarcerated people could pay for communication services.

“This is a stark contradiction and a slap in the face to that 2021 free phone call law we passed,” state Rep. Robyn Porter, one of the co-sponsors of the law, told the News. “Instead of eliminating [texts and emails], we should be focused on policies that support successful reintegration, which ultimately saves us money.” Encouraging people to stay out of prison, Porter argued, would lower the Department of Correction bill in the long run. 

David Bednarz, a spokesperson for Lamont, wrote to the News that the budget proposal aims to shift “the costs of messaging on the tablets … to incarcerated individuals,” although phone calls will remain free. Bednarz confirmed that Lamont hopes for the 2021 law to be amended to align with his budget proposal.

Porter, who has a son that was formerly incarcerated, condemned Lamont’s proposed budget cuts for prison electronic messaging. She emphasized that free texts and emails help people maintain family ties while incarcerated, a key factor in reducing recidivism.

“We wrote letters,” Porter said, recalling her son’s incarceration. “We sent cards when we didn’t have time to write letters. We went to visits. We made sure there was money on his books … We [wanted to] make sure he was doing the time and not letting the time do him.”

Porter noted that some incarcerated people feel more comfortable communicating with loved ones through texts and emails than through phone calls, which are recorded and monitored by correctional staff.

She also flagged the heightened operational costs that the state DOC might face, as the elimination of free texts and email will likely require correctional staff to process more letters and cards.

Miriam Gohara, a Yale Law School professor who represents incarcerated individuals in state and federal prisons, echoed Porter’s worries. 

A concerned family member of a client reached out to Gohara after hearing about Lamont’s proposal. The family member said that phone calls aren’t always reliable and that slashing free electronic messaging would limit incarcerated peoples’ ability to communicate with loved ones. A formerly incarcerated person previously told the News that prior to 2021, communication costs were steep, and he relied on his family members to foot the bill. 

Porter voiced skepticism that this portion of Lamont’s budget proposal will pass the state legislature. Others are more firm. Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, the nonprofit organization that helped pass the 2021 bill, is confident that the proposal will not move forward. 

“I think that we have it on pretty good word from senior members of the legislature and others who actively helped fight for this bill back in 2021 that [the proposal] will not move through,” Tylek said.

Tylek urged the state to reconsider its contract with the prison telecom vendor, Securus Technologies, instead of ending free messages in totality. The state negotiated a three-year contract, through August 2026, at a rate of $30 per incarcerated person each month for phone calls and $15 per person each month for emails. 

Worth Rises has helped other states implement free communication models, and they believe that Connecticut is being overcharged for electronic messaging services. 

Tylek said that Connecticut should restart the negotiation process in order to get better rates, citing the fact that the state renegotiated their existing contract with Securus without considering other vendors. 

She also mentioned that when phone communication was made free in 2021, Connecticut had one of the highest prison call rates in the nation. 

“When that was revealed to the commissioner at the time, back in 2019, 2020 he was shocked, and that, for me, really illustrated how inept the job was that was done around negotiation,” Tylek said. 

Lamont announced his $55.2 billion biennial budget proposal on Feb. 10.

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